


Kiss Your Better Half Goodbye

by ViciousRhythm



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Rock Band, F/M, Idiots in Love, Pining, everyone's in a band but that's mostly tangential, jawbreakers, wickedlywonderfulweekofreylo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-08
Updated: 2016-06-08
Packaged: 2018-07-13 01:57:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7133909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViciousRhythm/pseuds/ViciousRhythm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Punk rock band AU. Ben's shirts are all ratty band t-shirts, but they have some pretty good stories to them, mostly involving Rey.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kiss Your Better Half Goodbye

**Author's Note:**

> (I'm gonna be honest, there is a whole au planned around this that I will write eventually)  
> For the prompt jawbreakers, which I sort of swerved again because that's apparently how I roll.

He thinks about her at the weirdest times, and that’s what really tipped Ben off that he might be completely in over his head with Rey. It’s perfectly reasonable that he’d think about her on stage – her band is right after his own for half the shows, so that makes sense. He obviously thinks about her when he’s drinking or writing or fucking around on his phone, because you’re supposed to think about someone you’re sort of involved with at those times. It’s the mundane thoughts that catch him off guard and sometimes scare the absolute hell out of him.

That he wrote a song about her is, well, if not normal, then excusable. He’s a musician, after all, and half of Ben’s songs are about women, real or imaginary. Rey wandering into his lyrics isn’t weird. Wandering into his grocery shopping is. Ben hates hummus but he paused in front of it at some store somewhere in Georgia because he knows Rey likes it. He couldn’t make himself buy it because the fridge in the bus is always full anyway and Ben has no idea how to explain he bought his Not Girlfriend snacks without admitting that he’s thinking about her, so he wound up getting an extra bag of chips and chucking it at Poe’s head in passing instead.

She wanders into everything nowadays, and it’s much more terrifying than the kind of feelings that inspire songs about yelling and dancing and fucking. That’s the norm. He doesn’t know what to do with Rey tangled up in his everyday life, but it hits him hardest when they’re not on tour. At home and doing his laundry, he realizes he has a story for all his t-shirts and most of them involve Rey, and Ben may be irretrievably fucked.

-

The first time he kisses her is after a show – for his band, not hers – and Ben is still riding high on the persona of Kylo Ren, sweat stinging his eyes and too punch drunk to think twice before snagging Resistance’s bassist around the waist and tugging her into a kiss that’s more teeth than anything else. He’s only hung around Resistance a few times as a band, while they’re both on Warped Tour, but Rey has managed to catch his eye every time, even more so when she’s on stage. She attacks the music like playing is a fight to be won, grinning wildly at her bandmates all the while. Rey is as bright as the sun under the grunge of punk rock and Ben can’t help but be drawn to her, though he’s not brave enough to put action to his fascination. Not as Ben, but maybe as Kylo Ren, coming off a really fucking great set…

Ben only bothers to think she might not be as into him as he is into her when he’s already made the fool decision to kiss her, of course. Tonight must be his lucky night, because Rey doesn’t haul off and punch him. Instead, she jerks back in reaction, but pushes forward again fast enough Ben doesn’t even have time to apologize before she’s fisting his t-shirt in her hand and kissing him back.

Poe Dameron lets out an obnoxious whooping noise somewhere on Ben’s left before they’re both getting jostled and Ben has to stop kissing Rey to catch his balance. She’s smirking at him when he opens his eyes, pulling her lower lip between her teeth and Ben wants to lean down and bite it himself, but she’s talking.

“You know, I owe him ten bucks now,” she says, nodding backward toward Poe. “Least you could do is give me something worth ten dollars for my troubles.”

Contrary to what many people – including his entire band, the bastards – will say, Ben is not an idiot, and he can tell when a woman wants to be kissed, so he slides his hands down to Rey’s hips and kisses her.

-

Ben folds his shirt, centering the Misfits logo and folding it with the ease of practice that comes with having held down a job in retail. The neck is stretched all to hell from Rey’s hands yanking on it, though most of his shirts are trashed in some form anyway. Ben is the only one who knows why this particular out-of-shape collar holds any significance at all. He doubts even Rey remembers it.

It’s not like they’re dating in any case. They’re not really anything, except that they hang out whenever their bands are touring together, which is kind of a lot. And they’ve both got home base in the same town, so it’s not unheard of for him to see Rey around. And they hook up on the regular, so there’s…that.

It should be enough. Ben tells himself exactly that all throughout angrily folding his shirts. He shouldn’t be – fucking – _pining_ over a girl who clearly doesn’t want anything more to do with him than getting a good lay every so often. It’s not like Rey doesn’t know he’s available or open to the idea. He wrote _songs_ for her, dammit.

A rare light-colored shirt slips off the pile, a Ramones shirt with a blatantly obvious stain on it, but at least it’s fade to pale blue instead of the radioactive turquoise it had once been.

-

“Oh, fuck,” Rey mutters, what’s left of her slurpee dripping slowly onto the ground from both her cup and Ben’s shirt. It’s one of the few he owns that’s not black, unfortunately, so the bright blue juice shows all too clearly across the Ramones logo on his chest.

“What,” Ben shoots at her after a requisite moment of strained silence. “Wasn’t that kind of your goal?”

“Ben -”

“No, no,” he cuts in. “You made your feelings pretty clear, I think.” Ben gestures to his shirt, now growing sticky in the summer heat. “God forbid I try to do something nice for you.”

“That wasn’t _nice_ ,” Rey hisses, tossing her now-useless cup into a nearby trash can. “That was none of your damn business, Ben.”

“The guy was practically drooling on you,” Ben says, defensive. But it’s true. The merch guy for one of the other bands had been so obviously trying to smooth talk his way into Rey’s pants it was sickening to watch. In hindsight, maybe Rey hadn’t been quite as annoyed with his advances as Ben had thought, but still. What was he supposed to do? Stand idly by and smile while the girl he’s…hooking up with has some tool making eyes at her?

“Even if he was, it’s _none of your damn business_.” They’ve started to gather a crowd, because Ben has never been really great at not being dramatic – he’s a front man for god’s sake. So Rey grabs him by the elbow and drags him to the roped off area that’s reserved just for band members. Any other day, they’d probably be on their way to find a secluded corner to make out between sets, maybe even go for a quickie if they could manage it. This whole arguing thing is so far the inferior option.

“What and who I want to do with my time is _my_ decision, Solo,” Rey says when they’ve secured a space to fight it out without witnesses. “You don’t get to butt into my life all over the place just because you put your dick in me a couple times.”

Ben bites his tongue against snaring back that it was certainly more than a couple times, because that won’t win him the argument at all. It’s more likely to keep Rey from even speaking to him for at least a couple venues, if not the rest of Warped.

“I kind of think it does,” he says instead.

“Look,” Rey says, the picture of someone pretending to be patient. “You and I aren’t a thing, okay? What we do, it’s just…it’s fun, alright? But that’s it.”

Ben doesn’t let on that it’s kind of a kick to the gut, hearing Rey spell it out for him that obviously. He doesn’t say anything either, because he can’t actually make himself say anything with his heart in his throat. Rey takes his silence as mutinous, evidently, going on.

“I’m not your girlfriend.” Rey crosses her arms, determined and Ben resigns himself to standing there while she stomps all over his inconvenient emotions because he can’t bring himself to admit he actually has them. “I’m not gonna be the girl on your arm, I’m not gonna be wearing your clothes and fucking changing my status on facebook. I don’t have time for that shit, you know that.”

“Fine,” Ben snaps, just trying to get her to stop, and also because he does know that. It’s one of the things he likes best about Rey, how driven she is. Resistance is going to make it big, even if Rey has to kick and claw her way to the top for them. God forbid anything like Ben get in her way.

“It’s nothing personal,” Rey offers, not exactly apologetic, but her pride is too strong for that, so Ben’s not surprised.

He still has to take a minute to keep himself from yelling at her. It’s the middle of the summer, hot as hell, Ben has slurpee sticking to his chest and ruining his shirt, and it feels like he just got dumped without any right to feel that way. It takes serious effort not to yell.

“It really fucking feels personal,” he says finally. There’s nothing much else to say, not without getting right back into a fight, so Ben storms off and hunts down a hose to do his best to get the sugary juice off his chest. The shirt is unsalvageable.

-

Things hadn’t changed much after that fight. Ben folds the shirt, stain and all, and remembers with no small amount of bitterness how he hadn’t even been able to keep up the front of being too annoyed with her to keep on as they had been. Ben’s pathetic, if he’s being honest. He’ supposed to be this badass in a band, and here he is, folding his laundry and getting all maudlin over a girl.

He’s famous, he thinks angrily. He could go out to half the venues in town and find someone willing to sleep with him just because his band has been on a few tours. Ben could go find someone to fill his bed and distract him if he wanted to, but all he’s fixated on is being irritated with himself and where the _hell_ is his Jawbreaker shirt?

It’s one of his favorites, and while Ben’s little trip down memory lane has taken him through folding all of his laundry, but the Jawbreaker shirt he was initially looking for is nowhere to be found. Granted, he owns a lot of black shirts, but the bright yellow and purple logo is fairly eye-catching, it shouldn’t be that hard to find. If it wasn’t in his laundry, then Ben has to either accept that it’s gone forever to the black hole of touring, or he somehow managed to miss it in his dresser. A quick check negates the second option and Ben would swear he didn’t lose it because he actually does like the shirt, even if Rey made fun of it.

-

“Who even are the Jawbreakers?”

Ben catches Rey’s hand where she’s poking at his chest, or his shirt to be more precise. The shirt he’s wearing is faded so far the name of the band is a bit difficult to see, but he stills rolls his eyes.

“It’s just Jawbreaker,” he corrects, fingers smoothing over Rey’s wrist. It’s one of the rare times they’ve actually had sex in a bed, and Rey is taking full advantage of it, sprawled across Ben’s queen size mattress and half his chest as well. It’s more comfortable than he can remember being in a long while so it’ll have to end, probably on a disappointing note, but Ben is willing to hold onto the good feelings for as long as they’ll last.

“That’s a dumb name,” Rey says, not bothering to pull her hand free.

“Says the girl whose band is called The Resistance,” he quips back. “You know your band is the biggest cliché in the history of punk rock, right?”

“We’re _pop punk_.” Rey does tug her hand free then, using it to whap him gently over the head. “Explains why I don’t know your shitty, ancient Jawbreakers.”

Ben doesn’t bother correcting her. “They’re a building block upon which the punk scene is founded,” he says instead. “You should show your elders some respect. I’m pretty sure their whole career happened before you were born.”

“Like I’ve ever respected my elders,” Rey laughs. Ben does his best to memorize the feel of it – her bare belly pressed against his side, jerking erratically with laughter. “Whatever, you can keep your old man bands and their dumb names.”

"Fine," he says, hands wandering so that Rey squirms against him, that mischievous smile he likes so much creeping onto her face. "Maybe I will."

-

Come to think of it, that’s the last time he remembers seeing the shirt, so it can’t have been lost on tour. He and Rey had gone for one more round after that, and he certainly wasn’t wearing a shirt at that point. It has to be somewhere in his apartment. He isn’t so worked up over it that he’s going to turn the place upside down looking, but Ben does a thorough search of his place and still comes up empty. It’ll turn up eventually, he’s sure, it’s not like his shirt is going to up and disappear now he’s positive it made it into his apartment.

It doesn’t occur to him that he and Rey dressed separately and that he hadn’t actually seen his shirt after taking it off. He doesn’t consider that she might have it because Rey told him herself – she’s never going to be the kind of girl who steals his clothes just because. That’s not who they are.


End file.
